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DoodlesD
2010-06-25, 10:09 AM
The pathfinder core book suggests that building an xp budget based on how far you want the players to progress in level and to follow the guidelines for average player wealth for treasure. For a party of five to level from 2 to 3, i would have a budget of 15,000, which is actually not very much, and treasure is limited to 10,000, a mere 2000 gp worth of goods and gold apiece.

However, this budged doesn't seem to take into account the fact that parties generally do not run into every Xp giving encounter, and sometimes bypass a set of creatures or a room of treasure without their knowledge. My question is, how much should i expand the budgets to accommodate for missed encounters and treasure so that the party will level up after the dungeon and have enough treasure or equipment to be prepared for higher level encounters?

balistafreak
2010-06-25, 10:18 AM
If you're DMing, who's to say that because they "walked past" an encounter, you can't throw it at them anyways?

I mean, if my players tried to waltz straight towards the BBEG, they'd have to get past all of his guards/minions/Dragons/etc first. Not out of any sense of railroading, but out of versimillitude (spelling fail) and the fact that no matter what they say, BBEG's not going down to a bunch of 1st level dorks.

If they walk past the ranting crazy old man in the street, put him back in the inn that they're staying in. If they walk past an essential (but not secret) room in a dungeon, just rearrange the room contents so that they'll have to search it.

Some people call this railroading. I call this keeping the campaign coherent and taking care of my players.

Also remember that there's bypassing, and then there's bypassing. You might ignore the random old man as part of the scenery, but finding a creative solution that you didn't anticipate should (generally) not count as "bypassing" in terms of loot and XP. If they manage to, say, lock an owlbear in a jail cell instead of attempting to meet it head on, they should receive XP as if they had defeated it. In some cases, a "bypass" might be worth more XP if it had a better result than intended - for example, convincing a bunch of bandits to join your army instead of harassing it. As a rule of thumb, XP should be rewarded on effort, not accomplishment. With the obvious qualifiers, of course. (No, TPKing does not make you level up.)

DoodlesD
2010-06-25, 10:37 AM
I do like this idea, but there is a little problem.

encounter concentration.

There's no way to predict how often characters will bypass an encounter, making placement somewhat of a problem. If all encounters are placed early in order to shift them to later parts of a dungeon to accommodate missed encounters, there is a risk that the party will not miss any encounters and wipe out the XP budget's worth of encounters early in the dungeon, leaving not much but the BBEG.

On the other hand, there's a risk that the party will consistently miss encounters until very close to the end of the dungeon. Then they'd have frequent encounters until they reach the BBEG, wearing them down fight before.

Even if you set up a decent distribution of encounters, there will be a general trend for encounters to be concentrated toward the end of the dungeon because early encounters must be moved to remain included.

So how do you adjust for this shift in encounter concentration? or is it something that one shouldn't worry about? I worry that long stretches of empty dungeon will quickly get boring, and that frequent encounters will soon become dull.

2xMachina
2010-06-25, 11:01 AM
I prefer the Schrodinger's Dungeon. Stat up the enemies and place, but make them easy to swap around when needed.

Loren
2010-06-25, 11:20 AM
another alternative is the encounters are "not at home". This can run two ways. One they get to the room where the bandit lord should be, but he's not there. Drat he must be out raiding, having a midnight snack, or taking a dump, etc. Now the party can wait and ambush him, running the risk that something else may wander in or they can go looking for him. Either way there are chances for you to run your missing encounters.
The second way is that bypassed encounters become wandering encounters who walk into the room while the party is sleeping, or already engaged. This is my preferred. I fingure intellegent creatures are not likely to sit around in a room constantly. If the party is a way from an area for an extended period there is a good chance that dungeon inhabitance they left behind will wander through that space. Upon finding the remains of their compagnions there creatures may flee (taking their xp and a treasure with them), hunt down the intruders, or fortify in the best possible location and with as many of their freinds as they can round up (the result is often a massive battle to leave after beating the BBEG that the PCs are expecting or prepared for, after two to these they'll start doing a better job of securing their flanks before moving on their objective).